THE LAST MOONSHINER

I've really got nothing to write about but this caught my eye. I've seen interviews with Popcorn Sutton on the History Channel. He's lived the life I'd like to live, spending my time in the woods with no body to tell me what to do, working at what I enjoy and making something that people want to buy. Sounds like the way life's supposed to be lived to me.

One of the first acts of the American government after its creation was to clamp down on the Scots-Irish in Western Pennsylvania when they refused to pay excise tax on the whiskey that they produced, in an uprising known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Whiskey was a valuable commodity that greatly increased the value of the grains grown in the area. The excise tax on distilled spirits was the first national tax imposed by the new government and it still haunts us today. This is the first time but not the last that the government used military force against its citizens.

Popcorn Sutton was probably just about the last moonshiner still making whiskey the old way and he paid dearly for it after making this video. The government decided to make an example of him and he was convicted and sentenced to prison. Instead of turning himself in he committed suicide.

All this because the government can't abide by its citizens living free and making their own way in the world without Uncle Sam calling the tune.

"A scrawny, long-bearded mountain man with a foul mouth and a passing acquaintance with copper tubing and kettles, Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton seemed the embodiment of moonshiners of yore.

Brought up in rural Cocke County, Tenn., identified as one of four "moonshine capitals of the world" in the corn-whiskey history "Mountain Spirits," Mr. Sutton learned the family trade from his father. The practice goes back to the Scots-Irish, who brought it to the New World, and it wasn't illegal until after the Civil War, says Dan Pierce, chairman of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

"This is something that legitimately is an expression of the culture of this region," Mr. Pierce says.

Like his forebears, Mr. Sutton had brushes with the law, and was first convicted of selling untaxed liquor in the early 1970s. He mostly kept out of trouble after that, though friends say his nickname came from an unfortunate encounter with a balky barroom popcorn machine. But he was well known as a distiller around his native Parrottsville.

He was a familiar figure at the Misty Mountain Ranch Bed & Breakfast in nearby Maggie Valley, N.C., wearing faded overalls and with a back stooped, he said, from decades of humping bags of sugar into the hills. He picked the banjo and serenaded guests on the inn's porch. He helped decorate the $155-a-night Moonshiner suite at the inn with some still hardware.

Mr. Sutton put a modern spin on his vocation, appearing in documentaries and even penning an autobiography, "Me and My Likker." Souvenir shops in Maggie Valley sold his video, "The Last Run of Likker I'll Ever Make," and even clocks with his image on them.

Other moonshiners have gone legit and cashed in; a former Nascar driver and moonshiner now offers Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon in Southern liquor stores. But Mr. Sutton insisted on earning a living the old-fashioned way, and in 2007, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives busted him with 850 gallons of moonshine, stored in an old school bus on his property.

Notable deaths from the business world and entertainment industry from Tributes.com
He was convicted in 2008 and was due to report to prison Friday, his widow, Pam Sutton, told the Associated Press. Instead, facing the verdict and ill health, he was found dead by Ms. Sutton at the age of 62 on Monday, and authorities suspect carbon-monoxide poisoning, according to the AP. The Cocke County district attorney's office said it is investigating the death.

Although Tennessee was once a hotbed of moonshine and federal "revenuers" pursued bootleggers through the hills, an attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Greeneville says he couldn't remember the last federal prosecution of a moonshiner.

"Modern-day moonshining is the manufacture of methamphetamine," First Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregg L. Sullivan says. "Tennessee is in the top five states nationally."

Ms. Sutton discovered her husband in his green Ford Fairlane. "He called it his three-jug car," she told the AP, "because he gave three jugs of liquor for it."
Wall Street journal